One of the most common features of community websites these days is the events calendar. It's also the source of one of my pet hates, the stretching of calendar cells as event title links are added for a particular day. Nothing looks worse than an event calendar with an average of one or two events per day... with that one fifteen-event day stretching the entire Calendar control down the page. This is not just an issue of esthetics. If you only display a limited number of events for a given day, pretty soon the other event organizers will be calling to ask why their events are not being shown! In such situations, a compromise is frequently called for.

Recently, I worked on such an events calendar for my local town's Business Improvement District. The client  wanted an easy way for users to see when there were events without having to dig too much to find them.I did not want to use the Calendar control to display event links. I chose instead to implement a master Calendar highlighting days that had events, and an associated events listing implemented as a pageable GridView.

During development, I encountered the following exception:

ObjectDataSource 'sourceEvents' could not find a non-generic method 'GetEventsByMonth' that has parameters: startDate, endDate, startDate1, endDate1...

This occurred in the paging event handler for the GridView. I was adding the SQL parameters programmatically and implemented a quick fix as shown below:

Then I added the same parameters as before and everything worked fine.

If I ever have to do something similar again and there are a lot of events involved, I might have to look to AJAX for a more creative alternative. Has anyone found another way of doing this? If you would like the complete code, please email me.